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1.5.7-Pilferingapples
Brick!club, Les Miserables, 1.5.7 Monsieur Fauchelevent Becomes a Gardener in Paris In Which Everything is Going Fantastic and Nothing is Sad! Seriously, everything’s candy and flowers! Madeleine is mayor! Fantine’s got a job that lets her support herself! The town is so happy even the taxes are a joyful affair! Even Javert’s getting by in his daily life and doing ok! As soon as Fantine can bring Cosette home, everything will be perfect for everyone we’ve met and nothing will ever be wrong again! The taxes especially crack me up. I mean it’s probably even true, but taxes are just so universally despised (especially when they’re covering things like TOO MANY WINDOWS) that holding that triumph out seems like protesting a bit too much. But then we have mentioned before that Hugo’s not making himself the most reliable narrator, here… Overall this is creeping me out like walking into a butcher’s freezer and seeing a class of cheerful children singing songs under the hanging sides of meat. I’d forgotten how ludicrously smooth everything is in these chapters, but it’s LES MISERABLES; nothing goes right this early unless it’s going to highlight how awful things will become. And okay, yes, I KNOW what’s going to happen, but still, anyone who understood the basic pattern of narrative would be looking at this book by now going “oh no”. But not for long, because hey, there’s Madame Victurnien coming up! Minor language notes: I’m glad I’ve got the Wilbour, because it’s understandably the only one that cites M. Fauchelevent as breaking his “knee-pan” and I love that phrase. I want kitchen appliances assigned to other parts of the body. Shoulder- forks! Neck-cups! I SHALL MAKE THIS A THING. Tomorrow: A return to gross sobbing! Commentary Reconditarmonia Did not remember that LM talked about window tax! Just went and looked at the passage - interesting that it’s railed against as an imposition on the poor when it was aimed at the rich Pilferingapples (reply to Reconditarmonia) Oh wow, we talked about that SO MUCH. By which I mean, I was MORTALLY OFFENDED and everyone else put up with my ranting. The problem seems to be that the window limit was just set WAY too low. Twenty? That would be okayish. TWO?!? WHAT EVEN WHY. Acesius Fun fact! The knee-cap is also called the patella, which in Latin literally means ‘little pan’. Gascon-en-exile Hmm, I must have not been paying much attention to the timing of these last few chapters, because I thought Madeleine had already been elected mayor at this point. Oh, well. Not much to say about this little chapter, except that both of the new jobs here will be significant later, the one directly, the other via one of Hugo’s beloved contrived coincidences that allow everyone to always be running into everyone else even in one of the largest cities in the world. It doesn’t surprise me that Fantine is completely unknown to M-sur-M - she apparently had no past of note there, so she probably wasn’t even well known there back in her childhood. There might be something to say about parallels between Madeleine and Fantine with regard to gender roles, because Madeleine comes into town as a complete mystery and in short time is able to work his way up to affluence and a perceived degree of respectability, whereas Fantine is just a small town girl living in a lonely world, and the best she can manage is mediocre menial labor in a factory. A lack of social contacts and community support is bad, but it’s plainly worse for women. Also I have never heard anyone refer to a kneecap (rotule in French) as a “knee-pan.” Strange antiquated term, I guess? Pilferingapples (reply to Gascon-en-exile) Madeleine HAD already been elected mayor! But this is Hugo, and I can’t figure out if he’s doing anachronic order or just staging a one-book revolt against our tyrannical concepts of “timelines” and “cause and effect”. Complete agreement about the gender double standard being played out here— I think it’s a fairly realistic portrayal, partly because of things like Madeleine’s factory rules.Women are under more restrictions to start with, so they have even more reasons to depend on unofficial sources of support- and then again, a harder time finding them. And I don’t care how antiquated “knee-pan” may be, I’M MAKING IT A WORD AGAIN. Because it’s the only joke I expect will be coming my way for many, many chapters. Columbina It’s like that post that was doing the rounds a while back about the feeling you get when you’re reading a book and everyone’s problems are solved and everyone’s happy but there’s still 200 pages to go. Except there’s 1000 pages to go. Kalevala-sage Skirting a reprisal of our window-tax drama, I’m going to address the problem of delivering suspense via what you dubbed the “and nothing hurts” technique: the pacing of this readthrough is likely exacerbating this effect, but these tired plot-wise constructions, especially in combination with the much-discussed characterization dumps, aren’t doing much to endear me to the Brick as a piece of literature. I’m sure I’m not alone http://hernaniste.tumblr.com/post/47293890545/a-thought-just-as-history-by-hugos in asserting that Les Mis is, at its core, a social commentary; it is utterly Romantic, after all. Hernaniste’s conclusion delineates its timelessness as relative to political relevance, which certainly brands it a significant, transcendent impetus for political change, but doesn’t necessarily imply it to be well-crafted prose. I seem to recall that Hugo’s wonted heavy-handedness, for instance, has discredited him in literary circles preferring more nuanced symbolism—perhaps there is a reason the meta fandom pre-2013 consisted vastly of politically-intent historians, with only the occasional nonchalant in the form of a thespian, Francophile, or queer theorist. Brick!Club, on the other hand, has—haphazardly and with no official consensus, uncannily enough—tended toward close-reading: that is, mostly-isolated analyses of the work as literature (plus the un-isolated interjection of feelings, of course). This isn’t at all a criticism of the Club; I’ve loved every bit of it and there have been no prohibitions as to the manner of our responses. However, being insufficiently well-read to do proper intertextual commentary, I’ve often come short of ideas to contribute, mostly because outside of its puns, the narrative so wants for subtlety. Relating all this to today’s chapter, I am running on the assumption that if any first-time readers remain in the Club at this point, they were brought in by the movie, or possibly the musical—in any case, they are familiar with the plot. Therefore, in the absence of any so-to-speak truly “virginal” readers, I can’t help but wonder how Hugo intended us to react to Madeleine and Javert—I understand Gascon is big on the death of the author, but as I would find a post-absurdist argument (i.e. “there is no authorial intent”) for Les Mis highly dubious, how are we supposed to perceive Javert “shivering in the thrilled manner of a dog sniffing a wolf in the guise of his master” when met with Madeleine’s promotion? Are we to form good impressions of Madeleine without being marred by Valjean’s vulgarity? Especially after the cart scene, is anyone still incapable of guessing Madeleine’s identity? Or am I wrong, and is this overtness a means to some end beyond my discerning? Anyway, I just “skirted a reprisal of our window-tax drama” by articulating what I believe may be extremely unpopular opinions. If it helps, I’ll add that not everything is blissful in Montreuil-sur-mer—Fantine is explicitly bad at her job, and that’s pretty foreboding for an abject single mother. Pilferingapples (reply to Kalevala-sage) I am fascinated by the peculiar sub-sub-culture developing in Brick!club, myself; as you say there’s no constraint on our discussions, but there are all sorts of quirks already developing (the jokey subtitles, the embrace of minor characters, WHAT ABOUT THE HORSES) that I can only chalk up to the majority of us being fans more than academics. If someone wants to take the lead on an intertextual reading, I’m game…? But if it’s me we’re going to be talking a lot about how Les Mis relates to Star Trek and I don’t think that would be especially helpful. The most literary comparison that’s occurred to me is that Fantine’s time in the factory reminds me of Francie’s workplace in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn— except that Francie manages to find the key to open her way into the workers’ society, and Fantine, rather dramatically, doesn’t. (as for the narrative being unsubtle (a) YES BECAUSE HUGO but (b) I’m actually surprised by how many interpretations of this story have been coming up? I was expecting…LESS subtle, somehow? But things like the Javert thread make me excited for discussion going forward. I really hope no one’s sitting on an opinion for fear of it being ‘unpopular’—those are some of the best food for discussion! Kingedmundsroyalmurder (reply to Pilferingapples' reply) I meant to reblog this when I first saw it, but then I was dealing with catching up and finals and it generally got lost in the depths of my dash for a while. Anyway. I have found it again and I mostly want to weigh in on the matter of !club culture, because I have also been seriously appreciating it. I think in part the tendency towards close reading was fairly inevitable, given how we’re reading the book. When you’re doing a chapter a day you don’t really have that much else to talk about sometimes so you delve into the actual text and pull out cool verbs or fun parallels (or not so fun parallels) or minor inconsistencies or whatever. Plus this is Hugo, so symbolism and motif and such are not exactly difficult to spot, though as Pilf pointed out we have a decent amount of variety in our interpretations of things, which is awesome. Speaking personally, I mostly just really enjoy doing proper literary analysis because I think it’s great fun and this is a chance to indulge in that. I was trained in close reading in high school and it hasn’t been long enough since my last English class for me to completely lose the skill. Plus this is my first time through the actual unabridged text so I can’t really draw parallels to events to come, which limits me in terms of full-text analysis. And I also pretty much have zero outside historical or political knowledge to bring to the table, so all I’ve got to work with is the text right in front of me. (Though I’m one of the worst offenders for making comparisons to other works because my brain works by analogy a lot of the time and makes connections between random things a lot.) Obviously I can’t talk for the rest of the !club, but, as you say, we all seem to have decided to do it this way. As for the rest, subcultures happen and shared references and customs build up and it’s been really, really cool to watch that happen.